Another Page

Look! Here are a couple of pages I managed to do all by myself using Photoshop Elements. This is the first time I've managed to do ANYTHING on this program so I am feeling pretty darned proud of myself. AND I learned how to size them so they will fit on here! What do you think??

A Page

My cousin Deb is the most amazing digital scrapbooker ever. She is always creating these beautiful pages and posting them on her blog. I just love them. I'm jealous as hell, because I can barely use my Adobe Elements program to make a page and she just dashes off these gorgeous pages with no effort. Anyway, my scrapping friends and I are terribly jealous and have been trying to show off our efforts. So far my friend Ritha is the only one to make any progress. I started a page last night, but I'm not done with it yet. I'm having fun though! Ritha shared three of her pages with me, but I can only get Blogger to let me put one of them up. I'll post mine when I finish it. In the meantime - enjoy Ritha's gorgeous page!

Carmen's Grounded

Well, we have figured out what is ailing our little blue girl. You may recall me mentioning that Carmen has been favoring her left front foot when she runs, plays ball, or chases the Frisbee. It’s been going on for a couple of weeks now, but we kept thinking it would get better on its own. We poked, prodded, bent, and otherwise manipulated that foot up one side and down the other without her so much as flinching. The outside left toe knuckle is a little bigger than the others, so I was worried that she had popped or broken it, but she never showed any signs of discomfort when I would check it out.

So Greg took her to the vet last week and he quickly diagnosed her as having a sprained shoulder. I still don’t see or feel anything, but whatever. He gave her a shot for the inflammation and an oral pain/inflammation medicine. The medication smells pretty nasty and must not taste good, but Carmen has been pretty good about taking it. The worst part is that she isn’t supposed to use the leg for THREE WEEKS. No running, no Frisbee, no ball, no walks, no dog park. She’s just to go out to potty and not play around with Sophie in the back yard. She does not understand why she has to stay home when Greg takes Sophie on his daily walk. Poor girl. She is so sulky about the whole thing. That dog pouts better than any two-year-old I’ve met!

She brings her ball to one of us every day and tries to get us to play with her. I’ve tried tossing the ball to her and just playing a little catch, but she’ll jump up to get the ball anyway, so I’ve resorted to rolling it to her down my leg or on the couch. It follows the spirit of the law and she’s not running around or jumping. Mostly. Sometimes she drops it and then dives for it, sliding on the wood floor. I’m sure that’s not good for her shoulder, but she is so persistent and annoying if you don’t play with her a little bit. She will just bounce the ball at you until you either throw it or take it away from her. She is just not a happy camper right now.

Once she is off complete restriction, she has another two weeks of only going to the dog park on leash, and gentle play in the back yard. Yeah, tell a whippet that they can only “gently” run around.

Aside from being pouty, she's doing fine.

Here is one of the very first pictures I took of her after she came home with me. Isn't she cuuute??

Raz Goes to Jail

Before I tell this story, I want you to know that it has a happy ending. You all know how I am about stories with pets...if they don't have a happy ending, I don't want to hear it. So with that said...

I was coming back to work from lunch today and got a call from my whippet & letterboxing friend Rinda. Rinda has two whippets, Raz & Rikki, who are wonderful dogs. She has been out of town for the past couple of weeks, leaving her dogs at home with a housesitter. She called me in a panic to say that a vet in Estacada where she lives had called her to say that they had Raz. Don't know the full story on this part, but I guess somehow he got out of his yard (they have a doggie door) and someone had picked him up wandering around and brought him in to the vet and they called Rinda off his tags. She's in Idaho at her mom's house and can't really do anything from so far away. She couldn't get a hold of anyone except me, I guess, and asked if I'd run out to her house and see if Rikki was out running around also. Of course, I dropped everything and headed to her house, praying the whole time that Rikki was okay if she was out wandering the streets, too. Took me for-freaking-ever to get there because of all the road construction going on, but I finally made it, found her spare key and checked on Rikki. Rikki was safe and sound in the house. Whew! Big sigh of relief.

So I checked the yard and couldn't find a single spot where Raz could have gotten out. Gates closed and locked, no loose boards, no Raz-sized holes, no digging. If he was VERY motivated there were one or two spots that might work, but there was no sign that he had dug around them or hair that had gotten caught on the fence or anything. He might have jumped the fence if something really got him wound up, but that is so unlikely as to be preposterous. All the windows were either closed or the screens were firmly in place. After a bit Ramona (Carmen & Sophie's breeder) came over and did a look around with me and didn't have any better ideas than I did on how he got out.

So it's a mystery. I'm sure we'll find out what really happened when Rinda gets home. In the meantime, Ramona sprung Raz from jail at the vet and took him and Rikki home to her house until Rinda gets back (is it just me or are there too many R's in this story??).

A happy ending anyway. The dogs are safe and sound. Whew!

I Know, I Know

I haven't posted in a while here. But I just haven't done anything worth posting about. I'm BORING, people. Haven't you figured that out yet??

I just heard the most beautiful song this morning. I had to go look up the lyrics and post them here. For you Ipod users, go get this song, you won't be sorry. The band is Heartland. This will be a wedding staple for a long, long time, I'm sure


Look at the two of you dancing that way
Lost in the moment and each others face
So much in love your alone in this place
Like there's nobody else in the world
I was enough for her not long ago
I was her number one
She told me so
And she still means the world to me
Just so you know
So be careful when you hold my girl
Time changes everything
Life must go on
And I'm not gonna stand in your way

But I loved her first and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
And I prayed that she'd find you someday
But it still hard to give her away
I loved her first

How could that beautiful women with you
Be the same freckle face kid that I knew
The one that I read all those fairy tales to
And tucked into bed all those nights
And I knew the first time I saw you with her
It was only a matter of time

But I loved her first and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
And I prayed that she'd find you someday
But its still hard to give her away
I loved her first

From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
Someday you might know what I'm going through
When a miracle smiles up at you
I loved her first

Movie Reviews

I watched a couple of really great movies this weekend and thought I'd share. You've probably seen them already since I wait for stuff to come out on DVD instead of seeing it in the theater, but if not, I give thumbs up on these 3!

Movie #1 The Butterfly Effect
I love movies that make you think. This one plays on the theory of the Butterfly Effect; "If a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, the ripple effect could cause a tempest on the other.” I saw “Dude, Where’s My Car” and believe me, I didn’t have high hopes for Ashton Kusher in this movie. Surprisingly, he was quite good. This movie is about this guy named Evan who has always suffered from something that causes him to "blackout" during times of extreme crisis. All through his childhood he would blank out right before something drastic happens and not remember anything that happened. Now in college, he reads through a journal he used to write as a kid to notice that all of a sudden these harmful memories are coming back to him. When he goes to ask his childhood sweetheart about it she doesn't want to talk about it. He finds out however, that he can actually tap into his past and change what happened in these events. Unfortunately, every time he changes the past, even in the slightest way the future is also affected. I won’t give away the ending, but it was surprising. I totally recommend this movie. I sat down to watch just a few minutes of it while I was eating ice cream before going to bed and ended up watching the whole darned movie. Good thing it was a weekend!

Movie #2 The Island
OMG! This movie is amazing. How did I miss it before? It’s a cross between Logan’s Run, the Matrix, and Coma. It’s about Lincoln Six-Echo who is a resident of a seemingly utopian but contained facility in the mid 21st century. Like all of the inhabitants of this carefully controlled environment, Lincoln hopes to be chosen to go to the "The Island" - reportedly the last uncontaminated spot on the planet. But Lincoln soon discovers that everything about his existence is a lie. He and all of the other inhabitants of the facility are actually human clones. Lincoln makes a daring escape with a beautiful fellow resident named Jordan Two-Delta. Relentlessly pursued by the forces of the sinister institute that once housed them, Lincoln and Jordan engage in a race for their lives to literally meet their makers. Yeah, okay, I stole that description off of imdb. The whole idea is intriguing. The sets are marvelous, technology fantastic, and there are some truly amazing chase/crash scenes. Greg and I give it 2 thumbs up. I wish I could find a novel of it, but I can’t find any reference to it being a book before a movie. Dang.

And movie #3 Detroit Rock City
You all know that I like those silly high-school coming of age movies. This one fits the bill perfectly. It takes place in 1978 when four members of a high school band called Mystery do everything they can to attend a KISS concert in Detroit. In order to make it to the show they must steal, cheat, strip, deal with an anti-rock mom and generally do whatever it takes to see the band that has inspired them to be musicians. The soundtrack to this movie is so great. They did a good job of suiting the song to what was happening in the movie and keeping it pretty close to the right era. I went to order it on Amazon, and found out that who ever created it totally screwed it up. Instead of using the original versions of songs like “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC, they have Marilyn Manson singing it on the soundtrack. WTF?? I’ll just have to make my own, I think, with the REAL songs. I’m not a huge metal fan, but this movie has a lot of good ones in it.

This is SO COOL!

Guess what I just discovered I could do? I can download letterboxing clues on to my PDA! Isn't technology great?

Whew. It's Back!

Well, LBNA is back up and running. Talk about putting a lot of letterboxers out for a week or so. You should have seen the complaining on the lists! Sheesh. We all need a 12-step program.

Here is one of the clues to a letterbox series I did with my friend Maiden. She carved the stamps and I did the clues. So, can anyone answer the following questions:

Part 1: How many pennies are needed if they are placed on a chessboard as follows: One penny in the first square, two in the second, four in the third, eight in the fourth and so on doubling the amount with each square?

Part 2: 'Here lies Diophantus,' the wonder behold. Through art algebraic, the stone tells how old: 'God gave him his boyhood one-sixth of his life, One twelfth more as youth while whiskers grew rife; And then yet one-seventh ere marriage begun; In five years there came a bouncing new son. Alas, the dear child of master and sage After attaining half the measure of his father's life chill fate took him. After consoling his fate by the science of numbers for four years, he ended his life.' How long did he live?

Part 3: A rabbit puzzle: A rabbit falls into a dry well, thirty meters deep. Since being at the bottom of a well was not her original plan, she decides to climb out. When she attempts to do so she finds that after going up three meters (and this is the sad part) she slips back two. Frustrated, she shops where she is for that day and resumes her efforts the following morning—with the same result. How many days does it take her to get out of the well?

To get the clues to this spectacular box, you must provide me with all three answers. Can you do it?

Pet Update

Cleo lost her collar about a week ago. Greg thinks she teamed up with the dogs and got them to take it off and hide it somewhere. She runs around here in "stealth kitty" mode and is just loving it. I really need to go and get another collar for her. She is very sneaky without a bell.

Carmen hurt her foot somehow. I can't figure out what is wrong with it, when she chases the ball or Frisbee, she keeps coming up lame. She yelps and won't put weight on it. I just can't find anything wrong. No bumps or bruises, nothing noticably wrong, nothing feels hot or broken or torn that I can tell. Guess I'll have to take her to the vet and do a "toss test."

Sophie is fine.

End of update.

The Explanation

Remember my post a week or so ago about the guy who went all crazy at Greg at the dog park? Well, I’m here to tell you the rest of the story today.

Yesterday afternoon Greg took the girls to the park. They always go to the big open area first so the girls can stretch their legs and then wander the trails looking for bunnies. It gives the girls a chance for a good run and Greg gets some exercise too. So after they got in to the park and were in the open off-leash area Greg came upon the crazy guy (Greg just told me his name was Charlie) and his dog (Buddah). Greg went over to talk to him about the “incident” not to start a fight or anything, but just to clear the air. "Are you the gentleman I ran into about a week ago?" he said. Charlie said, (I’m paraphrasing here, these aren’t his exact words), “Well, I wasn't any gentleman. I owe you an apology for acting like I did last week.” Talk about taking the wind right out of Greg’s sails! “How I acted was uncalled for, out of line and very rude. I totally over reacted, but I didn't know what happened until later. I’m deaf as a post and didn’t hear you ask me to grab my dog, I only heard you say ‘well don’t hurry or anything’ and thought you were just rudely trying to get us to hurry up to our cars to get out of your way so you could go down the sidewalk. I talked to my buddy about it later, and realized what you had really said and I felt bad that I had acted the way I did.”

Of course, Greg is totally taken aback by this, since in our experience people never seem to apologize for stuff. He said he didn’t even remember saying “well don’t hurry or anything” and I didn’t until he told me. So he says “Hey, I appreciate that. Both of my dogs have been attacked at this dog park and they feel very vunerable and are very defensive when they are on leash and around other dogs that aren’t. They were feeling threatened by your dog and protective of me and the car and I was just trying to stop a problem before it started.”

I guess Charlie apologized all over the place and they came away good buddies. Isn’t the world a crazy place? Here we thought this guy was totally wacked and it turned out he just misunderstood the situation. He told Greg to be sure and apologize to me for him, too.

I think my faith in people been restored just a tiny bit. It was nice of Charlie to apologize and clear the air. He could have just been a jerk about it and ignored us if we met up at the park, but he didn’t.

We Did Something Fun!

We finally got out of the house on Sunday and did something fun. I know, it’s amazing isn’t it? We did something fun together! We put the dogs in the car and drove up to the north side of Mt. St. Helens. We visited the south side a few years ago and were amazed at how desolate it looked . We chose to go to the north side this time since neither of us had ever visited the visitor’s center or the observatories. It was a really nice drive and some of the views were just breathtaking. It’s amazing how different things look from the other side of the mountain. Since the mountain blew on the north side, nothing in the blast zone survived. It was all washed away in the mudslide and everything else that gushed down the mountain and into the Toutle River. On the south side, it just got the blast part, so there are millions of logs laying on the ground like toothpicks. The Forest Service didn’t replant anything in the blast zone area, but the majority of the land from I-5 about to the edge of the blast zone is owned by Weyerhaeuser. They lost a lot of logging camps, equipment, and trees in the eruption, and had to take out a bazillion dead logs. In 1981 they started replanting millions of little baby trees, so there are all these new trees on the drive up. None of them are older than 25 years, so huge stands of young trees are all about the same size. As we were driving along we’d come to these whole hillsides of these Nobel Firs that are all about the same size. It was a really bizarre sight, because it looks like one of those 3D pictures that you have to squint and cross your eyes to see.

The observatories were nice. Greg said it was amazing how much money could be generated from a natural disaster, as all the observatories had gift shops that sold the usual gift shoppy type things. Happily for me, that included a penny machine in all but one place! So I came home with 12 new Mt. St. Helens smashed pennies. I had to fend off a couple of little kids to get to the machines, though.

Greg got some terrific pictures, which I include here for your viewing pleasure.

This is the bridge at the very edge of the "Blast Zone" (sounds like a ride at Disneyland, doesn't it?).

The land heading up to the mountain. Isn't it amazing how bare it looks?

The view from Johnson Ridge Observatory. The mountain is about 5 miles away from us here.

Old St. Helens put on a little show for us while we were there. This is the lava dome, and yes, that is steam coming out of it. She doesn't like us to forget she's an active volcano!

A lovely over-all view.

These are the 3-D trees. You can kind of get the effect in the picture. Weird, huh?

Okay, I have to go listen to the B52's now. Somehow I have "Hot Lava" stuck in my head. Wonder why?

Letterboxing

You will notice that I have taken the main letterboxing site (www.letterboxing.org) link off my page here. No, I have not decided to give up my favorite hobby. I just took it off temporarily because the site isn't working. Apparently they get too many hits on this site now and the server they are using can't handle it. So the webmasters have had to take the site down. I think they are searching for a new host or something. The new site will be linked here as soon as it is back up and running.

There have been many unhappy letterboxers out there the past couple of days, let me tell you! We can't get our clues that will take us to our "fix" for our addiction! It's terrible!

I have replaced the link with Cute Overload, which is a great website that puts up very cute pictures. It's a nice change from the bad news that's everywhere else on the web.

Too Much Coffee??

We took the dogs to the park today and had the weirdest encounter with a guy there. We had just gotten out of the car and were leashing up the girls, when these two guys were walking towards with their dogs to their cars that were parked in front of ours. These guys were both probably in their late 50s, early 60s. One guy had a Rotteweiler on a leash, and the other one had a Boxer that was leashed, but the guy had dropped the leash and was letting the dog walk about 15 feet in front of him. The Boxer was coming towards us with his head down and ears back and wasn't looking at all friendly (I learned a lot about dog body language in Sophie's class last month, ya know, and this was not friendly dog language). Greg had both the girls on leash by now and they were barking and pulling while he was trying to back away from this dog. I walked ahead and tried to distract the dog, but had no luck. I was just about to say something when Greg said "Hey! Can you get your dog?" This old guy went ballistic on him. He got right up in Greg's face and said "What's your f-ing problem?" Greg said "Your dog is coming at my dogs." And this guy just flipped. "My dog won't hurt your dogs, he's not doing anything!" He yelled.

Greg was just gaping at this guy who had gone from stress level 1 to 10 in an instant and said "Well, they don't know that! They are on a leash and he isn't." And they guy said something else nasty. Greg said, "Don't start something you aren't going to finish." This guy, who wasn't much taller than me goes right up to Greg and says something like "I'm going to finish anything I start!" Greg took a step towards him, and the guy picked up his dog's leash and loaded it in the car.

We just gaped at him. It was so weird. What a stupid thing to freak out about. Usually we try to keep the girls away from other dogs when they are on leash and the other dogs aren't. Dogs just react differently when meeting another dog on a leash than when they are off, and a dog on leash with a dog off leash showing signs of being unfriendly is never a good combination. Besides, Sophie can be quite snotty to dogs when she's on leash, especially when she is resource guarding her car. The weirdo guy didn't even think that MY dogs might have been the problem, not his.

Anyway, it was just weird. You can't even go to the dog park without meeting weirdos anymore. I don't know what the guys problem was, but I think he needs to cut back on the coffee.

Cuuute!

Look! Whippet puppies! Aren't they cuuute?



These are the newest Dreams Whippets puppies. There are 5 boys and 2 girls.

They are related to both my girls, but I'm not clear how. Let's see. Mom is Jazz (Dreams She Got The Jazz). Her dad is Eddy (Ringdove Black Adder) and her Mom is Breeze (Summer Breeze Mirage). Eddy is Sophie's grandpa. Breeze is Sophie's Mom's littermate. What happens when your grandpa and your aunt have kids? Okay, that's just weird. Factor in that I think Eddy is dead, things get even weirder. So that makes these puppies, um, second cousins?

Dad is Buster (Dreams Bustin Loose). His dad is Rusty (O'ochigea's Vitalis) and Mom is Crystal (Winsome Crystal Blue). Crystal is Carmen's mom, so that makes her and Buster half-siblings. So I guess these puppies are cousins to her, too. Luckily, Rusty's lineage is not represented in my girls's line, so we don't have to figure that one out!

Consanguinity is weird, isn't it? I even had a chart and I couldn't figure it out.

Okay, now that I've brought out the big words, my work here is done.

Kris out.

Boring

I know, I've been really boring lately. I just haven't been doing anything worth blogging about. I've been going to work, coming home, doing a few chores, and then going to bed.

Oh, wait! I did do something fun. Three weeks ago I took my grandma to see "42nd Street". This show was our first show of the Broadway Rose Theater Company season, and my friend Julie was in California and couldn't use her ticket. So she gave it to me and I thought my grandma would like to go. We had a lovely "date." I picked her up and took her out to dinner. Nothing fancy, just Sherri's, but she liked it. She loved the play and was so excited to hear all those old familiar tunes. She said she remembered seeing the movie in the theater when it first came out. It came out in 1933, I think, so she would have been really young. I even found out that she used to tap dance! I never knew that. It was a fun evening for both of us.

Then last weekend we had our second play of the season, "Sisters of Swing." The second musical they produce is always a review of some kind. This one was all about the Andrews Sisters. Lots of great music and a terrific story. I had no idea they had started so young or done so much. I know my grandma would have liked this one, too, and I was going to take her for her birthday, but all the rest of the performances are completely sold out for the rest of the run (which isn't that long, really).

So this weekend we are going to our first 2006-07 season plays at the Lakewood Theater. This one a musical version of A Midsummer's Night Dream. Should be interesting. They never do a bad play there.

Okay, so I'm not as boring as I thought. Stay tuned for more excitement!

Sad

This is the saddest thing I have heard about in a long time. Sorry to make you all sad by reading it, but I can't get it out of my mind. Those poor dogs. The poor owners, too! It just breaks my heart.

It just goes to show you that you can't be too careful in this heat.

Thank goodness it is cooling down now, but it doesn't help those poor greyhounds now.

Hot

I'm hot. It's 100 degrees outside. I hate it when it gets this warm. I know, many people have it worse, I appreciate that. I didn't even want to go letterboxing today, that's how hot it was.

Thank goodness I have air conditioning. I bless the person that invented it!

Weird

I bought a little hand-held sudoku game at Walgreens yesterday. It was only $5.99 so I splurged. I pulled it out of the package and found the "user instructions" on the back. In bold all caps, it says "FOR HOUSEHOLD USE ONLY" on the very front, right under the picture of the game. What does this even mean? I can't put it out on the floor for use in Las Vegas? I can't use it professionally? Can you even do sudoku professionally?? Sometimes I really do wonder what happens to cause a company to put such warnings on things.

I got one of those Allied moving kits at Costco and right under the picture of a moving truck it says "MOVING TRUCK NOT INCLUDED". How stupid do you have to be to think there might actually be a real truck in this box?? Okay, maybe you could think there would be a model one, but really.

One Step Closer

We are one step closer to having the floors done! Today we had carpet put on the steps. What do you think?









It's a really short berber. It looks pretty good. We just need to finish the landing and the trim and we can check one more spot off the list!

Here's A Funny Site

http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/